I know there are oodles of people who don't give much credit to LJ as a learning tool, but I learned about a whole bunch of stuff this week through the LJ grapevine. Here are some that got me thinking:

The Rat Park Experiments & an article on diets in the NYT. Both of these got me thinking about how hard it is to prove something. I am fascinated by the fact that no one in the scientific community got excited by the results of Rat Park, and I am fascinated that no one cares that the commercial diet industry can't (or won't) prove its effectiveness.

I also learned about Shirley Chisholm, who died earlier this week. I had never heard of her.

Last night I got to watch 3 Dawson's Creek episodes with judithiscariot and we ate Cluck U. Pacey + wings = decandence, in my little world. Tonight, cheese dip. Current primary motivators are birls and fear of leading an ultimately ineffective life.

Edit: My ipod is doing this thing where when it tries to sync it complains about the playcount file being corrupted. It makes me cry, and makes syncing not work right. Grr.

Current Music:whining dog

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The Rat Park thing is fascinating. It also made a connection for me... There are other studies done on a variety of meat animals that test for a preference for painkiller-laced food. Caged chickens like it, uncaged chickens dont - this was used as an illustration that the caged birds had some experience of pain (and substantially changed UK fowl-keeping laws, but had no impact in the US). Clearly the environment was the factor in chicken-crack use. I'd never connected that to humans doing drugs, though. Huh.